UX Design should evolve to HX Design
We have a lot of definitions for UX but I feel that this domain evolved more than it’s name.
Accordingly to Wikipedia — User experience design (UX, UXD, UED or XD) is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product.
I think nowadays User Experience Design is more than just the interaction of an user with a digital product, as Nielsen Norman defined:
“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
There is no more a clear separation between digital and real world, and digital products are almost fully integrated with everything we experience in our day to day life.
So we should evolve this field, or actually go back to our roots, to Human Experience Design.
We have all this terms:
But everything is confusing and sometimes hard to understand what each means.
As Jose Caballer said in one of his classes:
We don’t need to worry about all this things because are all the same thing. They are all talking about how do you get from knowing what you need, to deliver it at the end of the day.
Although Jose’s explanation is to general, I feel that we should evolve all of this terms and their process into just Experience Design — Human Experience Design and to define a good process or framework which will facilitate us, the Experience Designers, to identify experiences that will solve contextual problems/needs for the “people of tomorrow”.
Focus on what really matter
This might help us focus on what really matter — The Experience, and not get lost in different terms for the same thing or trying to understand which career path are we on.
Also, this evolution will help our industry to be more clear for us as specialists and for companies that needs our expertise.
Take for example all those topics regarding UX is not UI, and how some of us are trying to differentiate UI from UX. When in fact UI is part of the current UX Design process, and should not be differentiated.
Too close to Human-centered Design?!
You might say that this is too close to Human-centered Design, and it is. But here is how I see it — we can have Human Experience Design as a big umbrella of all methodologies or frameworks that focus on human problem solving so we can eliminate the fuzziness in which we are right now. And methodologies or management frameworks like Human-centered Design, Design Thinking, Lean UX, CXD, UX etc. can be used by Experience Designers when needed depending on the context.
HXD possible definition
As Human Experience Designers — We solve contextual needs(present or future) of humans by enhancing their experience while interacting with a product, service, brand or even a person.
Don Norman, What do you say? Should we stop focussing on the User and start seeing it as Human Experience? Because from your definition and classes it seems that the term User Experience is not enough anymore.
While I was writing this article I found that others tackled this topic — Human Experience Design:
https://medium.com/design-story/figure-drawing-ux-and-the-human-condition-494a2734e0cc
https://uxdesign.cc/so-long-user-experience-hello-human-experience-b3ee694e6fa3
This is just a personal opinion regarding the confusion and buzz words from our field. But feel free to comment, maybe we will clarify this.
